"Trespasses" Isn't in the Lord's Prayer

Did you know the word "trespasses" — said by millions of Christians every week in the Lord's Prayer — isn't actually in either gospel's version of the prayer?

The Lord's Prayer appears in Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4. Both gospels record Jesus teaching the prayer; both have a line about forgiveness. But the Greek words they use are different from each other, and neither one is "trespasses."

— Matthew 6:12 — "Forgive us our ὀφειλήματα (opheilēmata) as we forgive our debtors." Opheilēmata literally means debts — financial obligations, owed amounts.
— Luke 11:4 — "Forgive us our ἁμαρτίας (hamartias) for we also forgive everyone indebted to us." Hamartias means sins — moral wrongs, missing the mark.

Two different Greek words. Neither one means "trespasses."

So how did "trespasses" become the standard English Lord's Prayer word?

William Tyndale, in his 1525 English New Testament, was the first to paraphrase opheilēmata as "trespasses." Tyndale's translation choices set much of the vocabulary of the English Bible (he's the same translator who gave us "scapegoat" for azazel in Leviticus 16 — see ep02 — and "Passover" for pascha). In 1549, Thomas Cranmer assembled the first Book of Common Prayer for the newly-Protestant Church of England and used Tyndale's "trespasses" rendering for the Lord's Prayer. The Anglican liturgical version became the standard English prayer, and Protestant denominations downstream of the Anglican tradition (Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and many others) inherited it. Even modern Catholic English liturgy uses "trespasses."

But Reformed churches went a different way.

Westminster Confession theology, Presbyterian liturgy, Reformed Baptist worship — they kept debts. When a Reformed congregation prays the Lord's Prayer, they say: "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." That's not pedantry. That's recovery of the Greek original Matthew preserved.

The debt metaphor matters theologically. Romans 4:4-5 uses debt language about justification: "Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness." Colossians 2:14 says God "canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross." Sin as debt → atonement as payment → Christ paying what we owed → the books cleared. The financial metaphor is coherent.

"Trespasses" is moral language — wrong actions, transgressions, infractions. Forgiveness of trespasses can sound like God overlooking misbehavior. "Debts" is transactional — there is a real amount owed, and someone must pay it. Christ paid it. The cross is the receipt.

When you forgive debts, you understand the cross differently.

(See ep31 for the related reveal that the Lord's Prayer doxology "for thine is the kingdom" was added later. The Lord's Prayer mini-thread: ep31 → ep42.)

📖 Passages: Matthew 6:9–13, Luke 11:2–4, Romans 4:4–5, Colossians 2:14